The Importance of Political Education
This piece is part of a series following the 2024 United States Election. Be sure to read the other pieces in the series authored by Joerg Rieger, Gabby Lisi, and George Schmidt.
Aaron Stauffer
In the early 1980s Robert Fisher wrote Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America, where he argued that the future of community organizing the U.S. depends on whether or not organizers and leaders can incorporate political education into their strategies. Without political education — that is without education and analysis around the structural roots of broader social ills, and specifically without analysis to the role that class plays in this analysis — organizing will constantly be stuck in issue cycles. Without an understanding as to how power flows in our current economic and political system, organizations will be at the whim of the broader partisan tides. Which, in an environment where money dominates politics, ends up meaning that the highest bidder directs the tide. It is not just that global financialized capitalism dominates, but that there is a deep concentration of wealth and power in elites who dominate our collective political life. Building power in working people’s communities means building collective organizations that exercise agency over the conditions of our collective life.
Fisher isn’t the only one who has made this point about political education: most recently Mark Santow reminded readers that this challenge sits at the heart of Alinsky’s organizing legacy around racial injustice. Today, we are reminded of the importance of the why in organizing: as long as single issues dominate the strategy of community organizing, those fighting for economic and political democracy will lack a broader vision of what it is we are inviting people into.
Issues cannot dominate our economic and political discourse. For example, saying that people traded democracy for the price of eggs (meaning that inflation was the deciding issue for voters) misses the point. We need conceptually clear accounts as to what we are up against and how we can build a more just world. Most importantly we need clear pathways on how we can get there. Organizing strategies that focus on single issues forget that community organizing is thought of in terms of relational organizing or value-based organizing. Issues fade; values don’t. When you ground the organizing strategy in people’s deeply held values, and what most threatens them, you develop a practical basis of the theoretical analysis in political education. In my own work, I have advocated that community organizers need to double down on the relational and value basis of their strategy. Without such a basis, leaders will burn out, lose interest, or fail to adequately grasp how power is structured in the U.S. political and economic life.
In a recent forum on the 2024 election, one commentator related how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held a social media forum with her constituents asking those who voted for her and for Donald Trump to explain themselves: how could they support her and Trump? One of the take aways from this forum is that politics looks and sounds a lot different to many U.S. Americans than it does to those of us in seminary classrooms. A deep distrust in the liberal democratic project’s ability to address social evils permeates our society. People are searching for “authentic” candidates. People have lost a sense of agency in their economic and political lives. To quote Sheldon Wolin, we are sick with "electoralitis" and see voting as our unique chance to make our voice heard.
The promise of community organizing is that it teaches people to enact agency in their political and economic lives. Organizing is really about building a democratic culture: a collective sense of meaning and action where working people have power over the conditions that impact their lives. It invites people into the work of building transitionary structures away from racial capitalism and into the work of building a more just world. This does not happen overnight and organizing asks different things of different people: we all have different gifts. But the work of building real alternatives and bridging the gap from the way the world is to what it ought to be will not be sustainable without an adequate vision of why we are called to this work in the first place and why the road we’re trodding is the right one.
People organize to protect and fight for what they hold most dear. Building strong organizations that can protect and fight for all working people will require building relationships grounded in mutual recognition and understanding between working people who are doing the organizing in the first place. Democratic cultures ask us to reweave our relationships, to reconnect with what it is we care most about, what threatens them, and how we can most adequately build a world where the goods we hold most dear will never be violated, desecrated, or destroyed again. This is the vision of Social Gospelers like Howard Kester and Claude Williams and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union who understood that getting to the cooperative commonwealth takes transitionary structures. This is the world that the Wendland-Cook Program takes up in every Solidarity Circle meeting, where people of faith come together to build deep solidarity, which we will sorely need in the justice fights to come.